One day a young atomic scientist walked away from the Los Alamos laboratories with a piece of plutonium. Four years later he was finally apprehended by the FBI. Medford Evans, who resigned his job as Chief of Training for the Atomic Energy Commission to write this book, shows how the Russian agents can and probably do walk off with critical materials and information on the A-bomb. Furthermore, he adds, it is entirely possible that these same Russian agents are assembling bombs here in the United States.

Medford Evans has written a calm and sobering book — a book that goes right to the heart of America’s most urgent problem. For, as James Burnham so rightly points out in his Introduction, “We can handle the communists if we handle ourselves. It is not so much that they are so intelligent and shrewd as that we have been weak and foolish. Moscow has made its mistakes, many of them and big. We have failed to profit by those mistakes, or to make good use of our own assets.

“On the political, social and moral phases of the atomic energy project, this book of Medford Evans’ seems to me not merely the best but alone in its class. It is written from the inside, from really inside: Medford Evans was there, and there from almost the beginning until he resigned his well paid, highly placed job. … He resigned voluntarily, under no pressure, because he believed that he had to try to tell his countrymen what he knew about their most important possession, their atomic energy project.”

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